Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday December 18, 2012 @01:20PM
from the so-many-men-with-guns dept.

In this video (with transcript), we review Planetside 2, a new MMOFPS game from Sony Online Entertainment. The game is a true first-person shooter, using its MMO nature to bring a persistent world into play, with battles sometimes involving hundreds of players, and it does so without trying to shoe-horn in ill-fitting MMORPG tropes like questing, story development, or insurmountable gear disparities. The combat favors relative realism (you won't be rocket jumping around, and nobody gets to be Rambo), but it's mixed with vehicle combat in a way that manages to be entertaining without being unfair. Planetside 2 is free to play, using microtransactions to support itself. It wisely avoids selling gear you can't acquire in-game (aside from cosmetic stuff), and doesn't require purchases to be competitive. Hit the link below to see/read our review.

First, it's important to gain an understand of what this game really is. The MMOFPS genre is still a relatively unexplored one, and the games that have been called such in the past haven’t all been alike. Plus, when you call something an MMO, people tend to get certain expectations. Put simply, Planetside 2 is a first-person shooter set in a persistent world. When you fight, you do so to capture enemy bases or defend your own, and you do so against other players. That’s it. There are no quests, no dungeons, no resource farming — there aren't even any NPCs. You’re dropped into a firefight, you try to kill other players, and that’s it. Don’t go into this game expecting it to be World of Warcraft with guns.

Planetside 2 is based on relatively realistic warfare — the Counterstrike school, rather than Quake. You have limited ammo, long reload times, and falling damage that can easily kill you. Your enemies aren’t dumb enough to paint themselves in bright, fluorescent colors, so it’ll take some practice before you can reliably pick them out from your teammates. It can be frustrating at first, before you've trained yourself to see the icon above allies’ heads. You’ll squint and wonder, “Is that a bad guy?” It becomes much clearer when they open fire on you. There’s good reason to make sure you’re lining up your shots correctly, though: friendly fire is enabled. You will accidentally shoot teammates, teammates will shoot you (accidentally or otherwise), and you will be killed by teammates running over you with tanks. It can be an annoyance. In fact, if you’re more a fan of unrealistic shooters, the whole experience will probably be frustrating, and Planetside 2 probably isn't for you.

So, does Planetside 2 have different classes? Yes. How many? Well.. that’s a tough question to answer. You could say five, you could say six, you could say over a dozen. But let's keep it simple for now and say five. I’ll give a brief description of how each of the classes play.

The first, Light Assault, does well at short to mid-range combat. It's fairly weak, defensively, but it has an advantage over the other classes in mobility. Where the rest are confined to running around the ground, Light Assault gets jump jets. Their range is short, but it allows players to get on top of buildings or big rocks, and to sneak into positions the enemy doesn't expect.

Heavy Assault is just what you would expect from the name. They're tough to kill, they have good short range damage, and they're the best at taking out tanks and other vehicles. The downside to Heavies is that they're weak against long range targets and often find themselves the target of many enemies close up, and they're dangerously vulnerable whenever they need to reload.

Infiltrators are snipers. They get a cloaking device and a rifle with a powerful scope, and they can do very high damage if they land headshots. They can one-shot some of the other classes, with good aim and good luck. As I mentioned earlier, it can be tough to distinguish friend from foe in this game, and a well hidden Infiltrator can be a real pain to deal with.

Engineers are a very non-standard class. They can drop turrets that can put out a lot of damage, they can repair machinery that’s taken damage, and they can drop ammo packs for other people -- a useful thing to have around, since if you survive for more than a little while, you can quite easily run out of bullets.

Combat Medics can heal injured players and revive dead ones, but those of you coming from an MMORPG background should hesitate to think of them as healers. Your heals don’t match incoming damage -- not even close. The Medics carry powerful assault rifles, and can definitely hold their own in short and medium-range combat, so it's better to think of them as a combat class that brings utility.

All of these classes are useful, and all have strengths on the battlefield. That said, they all have significant weaknesses, too. A Combat Medic can't do much against a sniping Infiltrator at long range, and the Infiltrator doesn't have much hope against a Medic at short range. Light Assault are great at sneaking up behind people who aren't expecting it and scoring some easy kills, but they aren't worth much without the element of surprise. Heavies can be alternately monsters or completely useless, depending on how an enemy faction’s class and vehicle balance is. On one hand, this is good, because nothing is overpowered. On the other hand, combat frequently felt to me like Rock, Paper, Scissors. Given roughly equal skill levels, your chances in a 1-on-1 encounter have more to do with what classes are involved than on how you play. That may or may not be to your preference, but the game was also designed to be more about large battles than 1-on-1s.

The nice thing about classes in Planetside 2 is that you aren't locked into any particular one. Every time you spawn, you get a choice: which of the five classes do you want to respawn as? So, if you keep getting torn up by Infiltrators who are camping hundreds of yards away, you can spawn as a Light Assault, then bring death from above. If your base is getting rocked by tanks, switch to a Heavy Assault and take them out. To put it simply: this game is much more about strategy than it is about tactics.

Switching between classes is easy, but not entirely without a price. This game’s specialization system is based on earning "Certifications." You gain these at a linear rate as you rack up experience points, and you also accumulate them slowly for just having a character, which is nice. You spend these Certifications on things like new weapons, upgrades to your existing weapons and armor, and also for upgrades to your special abilities. So, if you put a bunch of Certifications into upgrading your Infiltrator’s sniper rifle, you’ll lose out on that when you switch to another class. Fortunately, you never stop gaining Certifications, and your upgrades are much more cost efficient at the beginning, so it's entirely reasonable to be effective on multiple classes without dumping huge amounts of time into it. All-in-all, the ease with which you change your character around is light-years better than in most MMO games.

I mentioned earlier that you could consider the game to have over a dozen classes, and here’s how: vehicles. Scattered throughout the game are terminals which your character can use to jump into different kinds of mechanized transport units. On the ground there are 4-wheelers, Mech suits, tanks, and troop transports that are both armored and armed. In the air there are various gunships and fighters. Many of these craft are designed for multiple players. One person will drive, and another player or two will man the guns. The weaponry is powerful, but there are often aiming restrictions and reload requirements — again, it's an attempt to be relatively realistic as well as balanced. The reason I say these can be considered classes is that you can upgrade them just as you can your normal gear. Weapon capacity, optics, stealth systems, mine guards — if you want, you can focus your certifications entirely on vehicles and play the game that way.

Most of the vehicles are awkward to drive to fly — more pseudo-realism in action. It’ll take some practice before you can make it do what you want, and even then there are limits. But somebody who’s taken the time to master flying, or the positioning of a tank, can be quite a threat. At the least, it's an entertaining break from typical FPS combat every once in awhile. It's also a lot of fun to round up some buddies and load into a vehicle. By myself, I can take vehicle combat or leave it. With friends, I won't pass it up.

The combat in this game is fast-paced. In some cases, too fast-paced, at least for me. You’ll go through stretches where you can't even put your crosshairs on an enemy while you die over and over, just because the sneakier enemy troops all happen to see you first. It's balanced by the times you find yourself behind enemy lines with nobody aware of you, or shooting into a doorway that enemies keep popping out of. It's not hard to kill or be killed, to capture bases or lose them. But one thing Planetside 2 struggles with is giving you the feeling that you can make a difference by yourself. In my experience with the game, very few fights or battles are decided by the skill of the participants. Numbers always seem to count for more. That’s not unexpected — the design that allows for huge battles must necessarily reduce the impact of particular players. Still, it’s something you should be aware of before jumping into the game.

It's worth pointing out that the game is free to play. It's supported by microtransactions, which will let you acquire certain things sooner, but it doesn't provide a big advantage. By the time you acquire them through normal means, the increase in your skill level will outweigh the upgrades. It's also worth noting that the term "upgrades" applies loosely. Many are trade-offs. There isn't one clear best weapon, and your default weapon isn't lacking at all. Spending certifications and/or cash will go toward focusing on the way you want to play — for example, spraying from the hip with a machine gun versus firing short bursts while looking down the barrel. Of my friends who have played, one has spent money, and it was for a single weapon. The others have felt no need to do so. That Planetside 2 is free doesn't have any bearing on the overall quality of the game, but it does affect the game’s value. I personally wouldn't subscribe to it, but playing for free with some friends? Sure. And I certainly don’t feel bad telling somebody to pick it up if they want to play with us. If they dislike it, they can uninstall while their bank account remains untouched.

Several facets of Planetside 2 are not to my preference, but I can't say they're poorly designed. If gigantic FPS battles in a permanent world sound appealing to you, give it a shot. (Technically permanent, anyway — with no reason to say in any one place, and with bases constantly switching sides, you don’t form any attachment to the world as it stands, and thus don’t care a whole lot when you lose part of it.) If you are thinking about trying it, I highly recommend getting some friends to play it with you.

Planetside 2 is not going to contend for Game-Of-The-Year for me, and I don’t know that I’d even play it if I didn't have friends interested in playing with me. Nevertheless, it ranks very highly on my list of games out of which I've gotten the most value.

That’s it for our review of Planetside 2. We hope you've found it useful. Thanks for watching.

Just wastes yer time as far as I could see. Look, I really wanted to be impartial about Sony & like this game. But after 2 hours of aimlessly running around & getting 1-shotted from God-knows-where & having absolutely no fucking idea where I was, who I was, what I was meant to be doing or what all the colours & shit in the UI meant, I can only say...no thanks. As a *veteran* online fps & mmo player, I can only say that SOE dropped the ball on this one (surprise, surprise), certainly as f

Planetside 2 is amazing, until you go to upgrade anything and it all costs money, ridiculous amounts of money. Every little upgrade in the entire game has a paid option to it. I really enjoy the game, but im afraid im always going to be low-powered because i refuse to spend real money on a gun for EACH class and vehicle.

Planetside 2 is all we feared would come to pass, a great game shackled with a horrible 'pay for every little piece of functionality' mode. For the record, i have no problem buying TF2 gea

You must be grandfather-aged. Nowadays people going to institutions of higher learning are expected to spend their free time working for free or pennies if they are to have any reasonable expectations of getting a job that corresponds to their education after graduation.

Easy days of having a job lined up after graduation for most people are long gone.

How much is ridiculous? I played it for a few hours at the weekend, but didn't look at upgrading. There's so much to do that I didn't feel like I really scratched the surface. Once I figure out what play styles I prefer I'd maybe spend some money on it. Considering it's free to play, I'd probably be happy to spend up to around 30GBP. When I've played true free-to-play games before I've spent money as a thankyou to the developers. When games that I've already bought ask me to spend money to unlock stuff (I'm

A LOT! You would spend several hundred dollars if you actually unlocked everything... If you just focus on 1 class for some of its unlocks and a couple of vehicle unlocks you are looking at $50 USD. I haven't done the math but if you wanted to unlock everything, you could probably spend $1000 USD.

A LOT! You would spend several hundred dollars if you actually unlocked everything... If you just focus on 1 class for some of its unlocks and a couple of vehicle unlocks you are looking at $50 USD. I haven't done the math but if you wanted to unlock everything, you could probably spend $1000 USD.

This is still "cheap" compared to World of Tanks:) I know people spending 1000 Euros/Year on WOT gold.

Only if you ignore station cash multiplier days like THIS FRIDAY (3x deal). you talk about $$$ like its a constant conversion between it and SC when in reality few people that i know buy station cash when its not on sale.

Your panties are on fire. That's flat out wrong. You die, choose a new class, and boom, you're a new class. Simple. The more time you spend playing the more you can upgrade each individual class. Don't know which class you want to specialize in yet? Focus on common certifications that are applicable everywhere. You also can unlock additional weapons by simply playing. Have you actually touched the game? I was a beta tester for the past 8 months, and it is fantastic to play, and this issue simply does not ex

PS2 is rumored to be offering account wide unlocks. So if you buy a particular carbine, it would be available to all classes that can use that particular carbine. I haven't seen exact details yet.

And if you play between Dec 21 and Jan 2, SOE is doing another 2x XP period in Planetside 2. So if you're at all on the fence about playing, the next week is a very good time to dip your toes in and get some double-XP time.

The most expensive weapons are $7 dollars (USD). They can be unlocked by points earned ingame, but that takes a while (weeks, at least), and those points are better spent on actual upgrades (nominally, anything that can be bought with cash is a side-grade, although of course in reality, they aren't). However, you would want to focus on 1-2 classes and 1-2 vehicles. 1 weapon per class, and 2 weapons per vehicle (for adaptability) puts the total at ~40$, but Sony also does 2x or 3x deals on "Station Cash" som

A few weeks? I'm on 1100 certs after a week of (intensive) playing. On a good night when playing in a platoon capping points you easily grab 100/150 certs. Also keep in mind that when unlocking better weapons and the likes and customizing your classes to your liking you will get more effective and gain certs faster.

Most efficient way of getting certs is putting together a light armor column with a party bus and a decent galaxy pilot - this requires an outfit, but even the smaller ones can pull it off relatively easily. Then just steamroll through bases.

It takes 250 XP per cert, on an average night as an engineer, I can make about 5k XP/hr or about 20 certs/hr. Not bad, not great and about average. If you suck, you're only getting 2-3k XP/hr. If you're farming, then you can get closer to 10-15k XP/hr.

So, on average, expect to take about a week per 1000 cert weapon that you want to unlock. Or grit your teeth and find a grinding spot like Indar's Crown and be a medic or engineer to make more like 10-15k XP/hr.

That is the problem I have with micro transactions in games, there is NOTHING micro about it. You can play for free... you just will die a lot unable to kill others because your gun does half the damage. If your lucky.

As for buying things with in game currency, that requires either cheating (rampant) or an amount of time few adults are likely to have.

That is the problem I have with micro transactions in games, there is NOTHING micro about it. You can play for free... you just will die a lot unable to kill others because your gun does half the damage. If your lucky.

It's really not that bad, without paying for anything I consistently have a KD Ratio over 1:1. I don't find myself getting rocked by pro players either, the starter guns are just fine.

That is the problem I have with micro transactions in games, there is NOTHING micro about it. You can play for free... you just will die a lot unable to kill others because your gun does half the damage. If your lucky.

BS, play the game, the paid weapons do not offer a distinct advantage over the free ones except the rocket launcher for the flying vehicles in which case you have to give up extra after burner to fit them. This game is very balanced to the point where even though I have money i'm not going to

Wow, so you haven't actually played the game I see. I beta tested for the past 8 months. No such issue exists. They took a rock/paper/scissors approach with the weapons. So, you can side-grade to a different weapon with a higher ROF, but lower damage output and lower accuracy. Or you could get a super-accurate rifle with lower ROF and medium damage output. Or you could get something with rediculous damage output, but low ROF and moderate accuracy. The benefits of one over the other is highly situational (hi

A lot of people are whining about how PlanetSide 2 is strictly P2W (pay to win), but it really isn't. You can do just fine with the default kits, granted, it takes a long time to unlock some of the cooler stuff, but it fits the MMO model just fine. The advantages gained from purchases unlocks is very insubstantial. Anyone else who tells you otherwise has no idea how to play the game properly. I've seen entire outfits of free to play players that stand as proof that yo

until you go to upgrade anything and it all costs money, ridiculous amounts of money.

No, you get certs as you gain xp. New weapons require certs or station cash. The average cost for a new weapon is $6.00. The cert points are higher which a casual player can gain enough after a week or two to get a new weapon. Then, certs can also be used to enhance your class, weapon, or vehicle. You cannot spend station cash to upgrade a vehicle beyond unlocking a weapon.

a great game shackled with a horrible 'pay for every little piece of functionality' mode.

Again you do not need to spend any money to play the game and unlock weapons or buy the enhancements. You have an option to pay cash to unlock weapons but in no way are you required to spend any money at all. Cert points are required no matter what and have to be earned by playing the game.

The Station Cash currency that is used for the real money transactions goes on sale pretty much monthly for a day at 2x or 3x, seems the next 3x sale is on the 21st, but usually there's no notice.

Items also come up on sale, the weekly ones usually as equipment packages and individual items daily usually for about 40-60% off if bought with Station Cash. So even the top priced $7 guns could cost as little as a dollar if you spend wisely and others as little as a quarter. You can also try all the weapons befor

Its misleading saying a new weapon is $6.00. In reality it is 600 "station cash". This sounds like a moot point since most of the time 600 station cash costs $6.00 to buy but nobody I know that plays buys station cash when there isnt a deal going on. This friday (the 21st) Sony is doing a 3x station cash day, there is also a wal mart deal where you can buy a $15 card for 2k station cash, combine those and you have 6k station cash for $15. Now look at how much that weapon costs, $1.50 for a new gun on a

Its not so much misleading as to say without the deals it can cost about that much per new weapon. As another person stated you dont need to unlocked newer weapons for the most part to be successful. The concept that you need to pay money to do anything in this game is false. If my goal was to not spend any money in this game I could get away with it but only with a disadvantage that I'd unlock weapons slower than someone who drops cash for it.

Most of the important upgrades cannot be bought with real money and only the in game certifications which cannot be obtained for real money.The class skills, the weapon upgrades, the vehicle upgrades are all certification only. You absolutely cannot pay real money to get them.

Want to be able to drop C4? Want that all imporant dogfighting chassis for your striek fighter? That 12x zoom scope for your sniper rifle?You can't buy any of that with real money. You have to grind certifi

I'm not sure how you got modded +3 for this inane post, but congrats on spewing so much disinformation.

For those unaware of how Planetside 2's RMT (Real-Money Transactions) work, there are only two things you can actually buy that involve real money:1. New guns (whether for infantry or vehicles)2. Cosmetic stuff

All of the new guns can also be unlocked using in-game certifications. Note that NONE of their upgrades can be unlocked with real money. You pay money to unlock a gun, but then if you want to specialize into it, you'll need to use the in-game certifications that you earn while playing.

Money won't make you good at this game. It can give you a wider range of options more quickly, but it won't make you better than other players. Planetside 2 isn't a money sink unless you want it to be.

This is also wrong as higher level things are defined as "side-grades" by the devs, and they're right. The higher level weapons and equipment don't dominate lower level ones, they just provide other options. You might find a rifle that does significantly better damage than the starter ones, but has a pathetically low ammo amount, or something like that. It's very difficult to be pay 2 win in this game; I play it entirely for free and do just fine.

Planetside 2 is amazing, until you go to upgrade anything and it all costs money, ridiculous amounts of money. Every little upgrade in the entire game has a paid option to it. I really enjoy the game, but im afraid im always going to be low-powered because i refuse to spend real money on a gun for EACH class and vehicle.

Planetside 2 is all we feared would come to pass, a great game shackled with a horrible 'pay for every little piece of functionality' mode. For the record, i have no problem buying TF2 gear because its tradeable, craftable, sellable and confers no true advantage.. Planetside offers none of that, its just a huge money sink.

This is... flat out wrong. You can purchase new gear, only a few items of which are straight upgrades (Lock-on rockets for HA, a2a and a2g missles for ESF). In order to actually upgrade anything, you must spend certs.. and certs are only earned through playing the game and cannot be purchased (although XP boosters can, but meh).

Are you on crack? The game is free to play. After playing it for a few hours at the weekend I can safely say that tactics matter way more than equipment. Get into a MAX suit and you'll still be taken out in seconds if you don't know what you're doing yet (ahem).

I've been playing the game a lot and love it. Real money will buy you some weapon upgrades sooner rather then having to wait to build up the cert points to buy them. Even then the weapon upgrades for ground troops aren't worth it. Weapon upgrades for ground and flying vehicles are a help but again no real money is even needed to get them. You can not buy upgrades to your current weapons using real money. This can only be done from playing the game and earning cert points.

There are pure cosmetic items that can only be bought using real money. These are just funny decals or cooler looking armor and camouflage.

So.. the calculus is to get enough people hooked who will buy lots of crap that they -- as you just helpfully pointed out -- don't need, because it makes no difference other than instant gratification, to make at least as much if not more money by preying those than they would have made by, you know, making a product, and telling you up front how much it will cost to buy that product, so you can make a sensible decision 'n shit. And you think that refutes the post

God forbid you actually trust people to use their own money the way they want to, rather than tell them they're the village idiot for enjoying something you don't.

You're telling me that allowing people to play the game for free, then to make their own decision whether they want to put money into it, is vampirism? You'd rather pay $50 or more up front for a game you've only seen through advertising or reviews? What if it sucks? You're out $50 and you never play the game again. Here, if the game sucks, you're out $0. It gives the company incentive to make a good game, because they have to do more than get your foot in the door - they have to keep you around and make you happy. And it means they don't throw as much $$ behind bullshit piracy suits, because they can't claim they're losing money to piracy when their game is free. Everyone claims piracy is the result of a broken business model, then attacks the industry when they update their business model.

God forbid you actually trust people to use their own money the way they want to

Dude, I just explained how that is a non-argument when you conveniently ignore the manipulation going on, or the fact that we don't even know why we play games (to this extent). "I like it" doesn't cut it outside of kindergarden or abusive relationships, so fuck off with your moaning. Repeating the same BS with more words and getting modded up for it just means I hit a nerve, you dumb fuck.

you are so completely correct, they offered a game that was awesome for free, and gave you the option of grinding out weapons (which doesnt take inordinately long compared to let's say. . . vanguard or EQ2) or just buying them with real world money.

you can choose to buy or not buy, it's up to you, but you are not a weak target without paying which is totally fine.

It's accepted (because it's fucking obvious) that MMO servers need money to keep running. The game also has development costs. People like you who don't want to pay, don't have to pay. Anything. At all. And you can still do well in the game by all accounts. I haven't bought anything in it and was still having fun. If I get into it then I'd buy stuff to reward the developers. I doubt I'd be spending anything like as much as your average person spends on WoW. I probably wouldn't even spend as much as I spend

"Free" in this context means hidden, convoluted costs. It doesn't mean free. It's only "free" for you because others pay for the stuff. That's obvious, right?

And some of these will buy a LOT. It's essentially uncapped, they can easily spend more than 60$. Which is the model, which is why it's taking off. Not because "ohh boo hoo, stuff costs money" more like "fuck yeah, this shit MAKES money, and if we do it like this we can make even MORE money". Just because you may not be personally addicted doesn't mea

Anyone ever noticed how youtube is full of people talking hours an hours and hours and hours about games while they play them? It's amazing, if we spent 1% of that energy on actual problems we'd be golden next week, and I'm talking world peace and food for all like. But no, "I enjoy this, servers cost money". Fuck you, fuck all of us. Your individual feelings or even lifes simply dissappear next to the scale of this bullshit, so any amount of rage I could muster will never be enough either. According to Men

Honestly I got half way through there and I can't bear to read the rest of you're crazy pseudo-anger fueled rant. You're acting like people are too dumb to see how this works. They can see it. If they want to spend money on in-game purchases, so be it. Those that are spending a lot of money on this type of thing obviously have a lot of money to burn. And it's up to them how they want to spend it. It's not like a lottery or gambling service where poor people spend what little they have left over from alcohol

I really want to love Borderlands 2 but each and every expansion they've offered is the same story treadmill with it's own brand new currency (Eridium, Torgue Tokens, Seraph Crystals... because the in game money isn't good enough?) and blanket template that were farmed out [gameranx.com] to another company just to kick out content. None of them so far have equated to the fun I had with General Knoxx or Dr. Ned's.

I truly feel ripped off with the season pass purchase and it will be a hard sell to get me to buy into BL3.

I thought this game looked pretty good (never played the first one), however I won't be touching it because it's Sony. I wish more gamers would make ethical decisions when purchasing games (no, I don't share the feelings of Stallman, I'm just against a company that spies on you as a reward for being their customer) so that companies would actually be punished for their evil practices.

The people responsible for that trojan incident aren't the same people that worked on this game.

Doesn't matter. The rootkit incident, as well as some of Sony's other business decisions, have earned it a corporate death sentence from a lot of people, who will just never buy anything with a Sony brand name on it ever again.

It is not just one small portion of the company. Previous Sony related stories on Slashdot have plenty of examples.
Specifically to your example of Playstation, I would not consider the other OS [wikipedia.org] issue as "pretty responsive to the community"

You make a character, pick a faction, then get dropped into battle. Active battle. You have a near 100% chance of dying as soon as you land. Enemy players will be looking for the drop pods and will instantly target and kill you. You then will be shown a map with places you can respawn. If you run outside, you have about an 95% chance of dying instantly.

Drop Pods always drop me in the worse places. I've come to accept this when I start playing for the night. I've come to use use drop pods to quickly get to an area where fighting is going on when I start playing for the night. As for respawning and dying when you run outside, this is false UNLESS that area is about to be captured by the attacking faction. When they have over run the area and waiting for the capture bar to finish they will camp outside the spawning room. Just take the death and chose an

Part 2 suffers from the same repetitiveness as part 1. There is very little else to do in this game except shoot, shoot, and more shooting. You also have to deal with veteran players overpowering the map. Walk outside the base and you're guaranteed to get snipped. I'll stick with games like Skyrim, and Mass Effect.

Thanks for clarifying that. I can stand being head-shotted from across the zone by some camping bitch... but an involuntary vasectomy? Thanks, no thanks, I'll settle for being chain-ganked by Korean gold farmers in WoW.

You're complaining that there's too much shooting in a first-person shooter?

Heck, given all the options for alternative roles thansk to the MMO environment (scouting, infiltration, sabotage/countersabotage, many more), this is probably the least repetitively shoot-y FPS out there.

Having played Planetside 1 from beta (sill have cd's!) and for a few years after launch, a lot of the people I used to play that with were pretty excited about planetside 2, until we actually got to play it. The summary about it was pretty much this:Everything you hated about planetside 1? We took it out.Everything you liked about planetside 1? We dropped most of that too!Things you thought were missing from Planetside 1? We put some of those in.

This one feels like pretty much a large map rip-off of all the other fps's out on the scene now, and I've taken to calling it Planetfieldfall2: modern agenda.

Graphics are pretty good, maps are still huge, but all the things that would make us get 20-30 people together to storm around and kick some butt together are gone. Thanks for nothing and you won't be getting any cash from me.

All of those 'cons' that are listed as problems with MMORPGs, you know, like questing and gear progression, are actually things that people enjoy, as long as they're designed fairly. See GW2 as an excellent example of this.

I've been around. I have had so many highs like getting a 2600 and playing Space Invaders one Christmas, booting up Lemmings for the first time on my Amiga, beating Kid Icarus on my NES, rescuing the princess in Link to the Past on the SNES, blowing people up in Doom with three other people sitting next to me, slaying Dragons for the first time in Everquest with 50 people, toppling enemy mechs with a few other players in Chromehounds, and now finally being in a squad of soldiers, being led by a platoon leader across an alien world with thousands of other soldiers made up of different outfits that consist of multiple platoons. All tasked with taking specific objectives. Blinding the enemy installations with smoke grenades and turning on your IR vision and sneaking around taking people out. Jumping into a huge flying whale of an airship that can carry over a dozen people. Being flown over a distant enemy base to drop out onto the roof and storming into buildings. Leaping over obstacles and into the air with your jet pack and over 5 enemy guys who dont see you. You look over the ledge and drop a grande onto them racking up the kills. You secure the base. Load up and move to another. All with real voice coms chatting back and forth warning of mines, and enemy armor.

Not only is this one of the best looking games I've ever seen, it can give you one of the most epic war moments you will ever experience at this time. Two dozen troopers running over a hilltop flanked by tanks as your air support swoops down ahead of you to soften up the line. IT IS THAT EPIC.

The free part makes this a no brainer to try at the very least. I would hate to see someone pass by the opportunity. It is one of gamings greats.

No, I don't work for Sony. But I love this game. A lot. Try it! We need you!

As a gamer who's been around since the 2600 too, I agree this is one of the best games ever made. The war moments you have in it are just priceless. You can shoot down air with a tank if you have a lucky shot. You can strap c4 to a quad runner, and hit boost on the quad then jump off, so it goes flying into a tank and kills the tank. You can jump out of a plane, but die on impact. Yet if you have jet packs, you can jump out of a plane, but boost so you don't die. Then you're fighting behind enemy terr

I've had a ton of fun with this game. The review just scratches the surface, but if you've played any of the Battlefield games multiplayer you will largely understand the basic game. It's just instead of having a small map with 3 or 4 command points, you have 3 huge maps (continents) with dozens of command points.

As the review says, the starting weapons are plenty good, and upgrades upgrade the way you play rather than the damage of the weapon. For example, you can get red dot scopes for short range batt

Steam tells me I've played Planetside 2 for 72 hours. In general, it's a valid review that covers a lot of good points, despite noticing that the reviewer's player was obviously low-level.

Some that I would add however, is:

a) The game does not offer a comfortable intro to the brand-new player, it will probably spawn you into instant death and there are a lot of things to figure out. The flipside is much of the reason for that is depth.

b) It's not so vital to play with actual friends, but rather a good squad. When you join the game look at the squad tab and go through them looking for someone using voice comms and setting waypoints on the map. Provided I do look for one, I will usually find an enjoyable squad and that is despite playing at off-peak hours. Playing without a decent squad is very tiresome, lonesome, has no direction and you'll find yourself wondering what to do. Playing with a good squad is the opposite and the trouble is keeping up!

c) Unless I missed it, he didn't mention that there are 3 factions (hence the 3 colours demonstrating control on the map screen) and they are not quite symmetric. The reviewer is playing as Vanu which is the only one that has that alien-ish theme with ultra futuristic uniforms and laser type weapons. The other two are more conventional. Each faction's weapons and vehicles have attributes with that factions trend e.g. one faction has lower damage per projectile but higher rate of fire, another faction the opposite.

d) He's a bit harsh implying individual skill doesn't matter. Your l33t skillz might not be quite so obvious to everyone, you're unlikely to "pwn" everyone quite so hard with ridiculous k/d ratios. But the game is balanced pretty well so skilled fraggers will have higher k/d and certainly will make a difference, all else being equal - it's just that you cannot solely rely on your skills and will also need teamplay.

e) I think this is also where the reviewer goes wrong saying that it's hard to feel you are contributing. In an okay squad it's actually very easy and the game gives you congratulatory messages and experience point rewards making it very clear. Players are generous with the "thank you" voice command. There's also a lot more variety in the ways you can contribute than any game I can think of. Maybe you're not actually any good at FPS shooting, but maybe you'll be good at tank tactics, dogfighting, support roles like engineer or medic, infiltrating and hacking, or simply ferrying people around.

f) Agreeing with the reviewer and contradicting some other posters, I'm having difficulty finding a need to put real money into this game. I've spent about half the cost of a typical new game so far, and all of that was a splurge because I felt I should contribute given the hours I've gotten from the game. Sure you could spend a lot of money but there's really no need to. Aside from a couple of vehicle items, anything items to buy where to experience-point cost is high thus viable for real-money, they're sidegrades more for preference, like trading short-range raw damage for longer range accuracy. A complete set would cost a ton of money, but you don't want a complete set and anyway you can get everything with enough experience points so if you stick with the game you can be finding yourself picking up rare-use options for no money.

g) There is no other game where you can experience the epic, massive battles that this game can offer. If that is what you are looking for - you can also easily avoid those and go running around with a small or moderately sized squad.

Lone-wolf types need not apply unless you can fly a ESF (empire-specific fighter). Get into a squad, even a pickup-group, and follow them around. Start looking at everyone's outfit (guild / clan / corp) tags in square brackets. Pay attention to who seems to be team-oriented and which groups only zerg. Then find their recruiting posts on the forums and join up.

If you're in a half-decent outfit, that uses voice comms, approaches the map at a strategi

I was totally in agreement with you until "...g) There is no other game where you can experience the epic, massive battles that this game can offer. If that is what you are looking for - you can also easily avoid those and go running around with a small or moderately sized squad...."

Planetside 2 has the same problems as all SEO and PvP games. Bugs and rampant cheating. Aimbots and people using exploits to get stuck in walls were they can shoot others but can't be hit. Oh, you can report people and some do get banned but in a F2P game, a new account is a few clicks away and they are right back, exploiting again.

Balance is also completely absent from the game, possibly the worst mistake they made is including friendly fire. There will be idiots who drive over their own side with a tank.

Thankfully your worst case scenarios are just that. It's nothing like that in the game at all currently. Yes, you will be run over. A lot. But if you're smaller than the thing driving around you, move out of the way. The best you can do it play LA and use jetpacks to move around in areas of high vehicle traffic.

They should at least change something so tribes 2 [wikipedia.org] players will feel like they are playing something different. Surely they didn't just steal the unofficial patch [wikipedia.org]? I didn't see a disc gun so I guess removing stuff makes it "different".

Disagree. I play with a 4 year old Core2Quad 2ghz processor and a 550Ti and I get a reasonable frame rate in every situation. Both are considered budget gaming at this point. I roll with about 200+ people a night during prime time, and we class with groups even larger than us. The frame rate remains stable. You don't need a monster to play this game, certainly not by todays standards.

Yeah, supposedly there's an optimization patch coming in January. I'm hopeful, because right now I'm CPU-bound (hit Alt-F in game and see the "[CPU]" tag in light blue). That's with a brand new GeForce 660 Ti card installed - which is no slouch.

Open world I can get a good 50-60 FPS. Most fights I'm in the 30-35 range. But in a big fray, I'm down to 17-20 which is laggy and annoying to play.

Why not play all three classes then? People rarely stick to one class. I spawn in Inf when a base needs to be capped and hack all the terminals, I spawn Light Assault when we're having problems getting IN to a base, I spawn a Heavy when there is too much air and land vehicles and they need to be taken out. I prefer Light Assault over all of them, but I rotate as needed.

Since you mentioned performance issues, I thought I'd let you know that Lupreza (sonys rep) mentioned in the last live stream they are currently working on a huge patch that will be a major optimization revamp for large battles. Many folks have experienced some drop outs or errors in the client with hundreds of people in battles, and this is being addressed with the major patch. So keep an eye out, I have a feeling it will be coming in a few weeks from the way she was talking.